1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  At Columbia, SDS students felt the need for an ideology that fit their action program. Martin Luther King had had his moral imperative, but since these students hadn’t come from religious backgrounds, this approach did not suit most of them. The communist approach of being part of a great party, the great movement—was too authoritarian. The Cuban approach was too militaristic. “There was an idea in SDS that we have the practice but the Europeans have the theory,” said Cole. Cohn-Bendit had the same view. He said, “The Americans have no patience for theory. They just act. I was very impressed with this American Jerry Rubin, just do it.” But at Columbia, where the students had been so successful at getting attention, they were feeling the need for an underlying theory that could explain why they were doing the things they did. Cole admitted to a feeling of intimidation at the prospect of debating with skilled European theoreticians.

  The London meeting was almost stopped by British immigration, which tried to keep the radicals out. The Tories did not want to let Cohn-Bendit in, but James Callaghan, the home secretary, interceded on his behalf, saying that exposure to British democracy would be good for him. Lewis Cole was stopped at the airport, and the BBC had to contact the government to get him in.

  Cohn-Bendit immediately clarified to the press that they were not leaders but rather “megaphones, you know, loudspeakers of the movement,” which was an accurate description of himself and many of the others. Cohn-Bendit engaged in a put-on. De Gaulle had first come to prominence in June 1940 when he left France, and in exile in Britain he made a famous broadcast to the French people asking them to keep resisting the Germans and not to follow the collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain. Cohn-Bendit now announced that he was asking for British asylum. “I will ask the BBC to reorganize the Free French radio as they did during the war.” He said that he would copy de Gaulle’s exact message, except that where he had said “Nazis” he would say “French fascists” and where he had said “Pétain” he would say “de Gaulle.”

  The debate was dominated by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born British leader who had once been president of the famous debating society the Oxford Union. Ali said that students renounced elections as a means for social change.

  Afterward they all went to the grave of Karl Marx and had their picture taken.

  Cohn-Bendit returned to Germany vowing that he would renounce his leadership and disappear into the movement. He said that he had fallen prey to “the cult of personalities” and that “power corrupts.” He told the Sunday Times of London, “They don’t need me. Whoever heard of Cohn-Bendit five months ago? Or even two months ago?”

  Cole found it a confusing experience. He never did understand what Cohn-Bendit’s ideology was, and he found Tariq Ali’s debating skills offputting. The people he connected with most were from the German SDS, and he toured Germany afterward with “Kaday” Wolf. “In the end,” he said, “the ones with the greatest similarities were the Germans. And the Germans had a lot of the same cultural influences—Marcuse and Marx. And an intense feeling of youth being incredibly alienated. A young person in young dress walks down a street in Germany and the older Germans just glared at him.”

  But by fall Cole was back at Columbia with a theory he had gleaned from the French called “exemplary action.” The French had done exactly what the Columbia students were trying to do—analyze what they had done and evolve a theory from their actions. The theory of “exemplary action” was that a small group could take an action that would serve as a model for larger groups. Seizing Nanterre had been such an action.

  Traditional Marxist-Leninism is contemptuous of such theories, which it labels “infantilism.” In June Giorgio Amendola, a theoretician and member of the steering committee of the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party in the West, attacked the Italian student movement for “extremist infantilism” and scoffed at the idea that they were qualified to lead a revolution without having built their mass base in the traditional Marxist approach. He termed it “revolutionary dilettantism.” Lewis Cole said, “Exemplary action gave us our first theory. That was why we had so many meetings. The question was always, what do we do now?”

  SDS poster announcing a demonstration before election day, 1968

  (Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

  With their theory now in place, they were ready to be a revolutionary center to prepare, as Hayden had said, “two, three, many Columbias.” The theory also helped the national office of the rapidly growing SDS become more of a command center. The first action at Columbia was a demonstration against the invasion of Prague. But that was still in August, and few people came. According to Cole, “It wasn’t very well done. The slogan was ‘Saigon, Prague, the pig is the same all over the world.’”

  Columbia SDS, looking for an event to restart the movement, came up with the idea of hosting a student international, but from the outset it was a disaster. Two days before the conference began, the news broke of the student massacre in Mexico. Columbia students, feeling guilty because they had not even known that there was a student movement in Mexico, tried to organize a demonstration at the conference. But they were unable to come up with any consensus. The French situationists spent the second day doing parodies of everyone who spoke. To some, it was a welcome diversion from too much speaking. Cole recalled, “We found that there were huge differences between all of us. All we could agree on was antiauthoritarianism, and alienation from society, these sorts of cultural issues.” Increasingly, the other delegations grew irritated at the French, especially the Americans, who felt the French were lecturing them on Vietnam and failing to understand what a burning issue it was in the United States.

  In Mark Rudd’s assessment, “The Europeans were too pretentious, too intellectual. They only wanted to talk. It was more talk. People made speeches, but I realized nothing would happen.”

  Rudd had no doubt that he was at a historic moment, that a revolution was slowly unfolding and his job was to help it along. A bit of Che—“The first duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution”—mixed with the notion called “bringing the war home” and the theory of exemplary action, and in June 1969 he came up with the Weathermen, a violent underground guerrilla group named after the Bob Dylan lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In March 1970 they changed their name to the Weather Underground because they realized that the original name was sexist. In hindsight, it seems evident that a guerrilla group started by middle-class men and women who name their group from a Bob Dylan song will likely be their own worst enemies. Their only victims were three of their own, who blew themselves up making bombs in a house in Greenwich Village. But others turned to violence as well. The government was violent. The police were violent. The times were violent and revolution was so close. David Gilbert, who had first knocked on Rudd’s dormitory door to recruit him for SDS, continued after the mid-1970s when the Weather Underground dissolved and more than twenty years later was still in prison for his part in a fatal 1981 shootout. Many 1968 student radicals became 1970s underground guerrilla fighters in Mexico, Central America, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.

  Politics sometimes has longer tentacles than imagined. That fateful first day of spring when Rockefeller collapsed the earth from under the liberal wing of the Republican Party unleashed a chain of events that the United States has been living with ever since. A new kind of Republican was born in 1968. That became clear at the end of June, when President Johnson appointed Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren had resigned before the close of the Johnson administration because he believed Nixon would win and he did not want to see his seat taken over by a Nixon appointee. Fortas was a predictable choice, a friend of Johnson, who had appointed him to replace Arthur Goldberg three years earlier. Fortas had distinguished himself as a leader of the liberal activist judges who had characterized the Court since the mid-1950s. Although he was the fifth Jewish justice o
n the Court, he would have been the first Jewish chief justice.

  At the time, the Senate rarely battled over Court appointments. Both Republican and Democratic senators recognized the right of the president to have his choice. In fact, there had not been a battle since John J. Parker, Herbert Hoover’s appointee, was rejected by two votes in 1930.

  But when Fortas was named there was an immediate outcry of “cronyism.” Fortas was a long-standing friend and adviser to the president, but he was also eminently qualified. The charge of cronyism was more effective against Johnson’s other appointment to take Fortas’s seat, Homer Thornberry. Thornberry was an old friend of Johnson, who had advised him not to accept the vice presidential nomination and then changed his mind and was at Johnson’s side when he was sworn in as president after John Kennedy’s death. A congressman for fourteen years, he became an undistinguished circuit court judge. He had been a segregationist until Johnson came to power and then reversed his stance, coming out on the desegregation side of several notable cases.

  But cronyism was not the main issue; it was the right of Johnson to appoint Supreme Court justices. Republicans, who had been in the White House only eight of the past thirty-six years, felt they had a good chance of taking over in 1968, and some Republicans wanted their own judges. Robert Griffin, Republican from Michigan, got nineteen Republican senators to sign a petition saying that Johnson, with only seven months left in office, should not get to pick two judges. There was absolutely nothing in law or tradition to back up this position. At that point in the twentieth century, Supreme Court judges had been appointed in election years six times. William Brennan had been named by Eisenhower one month before the election. John Adams picked his friend John Marshall, one of the most respected appointments in history, only weeks before Jefferson was to take office. Griffin simply wished to deny Johnson his appointments. “Of course, a lame duck president has the constitutional power to submit nominations for the Supreme Court,” argued Griffin, “but the Senate need not confirm them.” But Griffin and his coalition of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats were not doing this completely on their own. According to John Dean, who later served as special counsel to President Nixon, candidate Nixon kept in regular contact with Griffin through John Ehrlichman, later the president’s chief adviser on domestic affairs.

  But the Democrats had an almost two-to-one majority and supported the appointments, and a great deal of the Republican leadership, including the minority leader, Everett Dirksen, did as well.

  At his hearings Fortas was submitted to a grilling unprecedented in the history of chief justice appointees. He was attacked by a coalition of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats. Among his chief inquisitors were Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, who denounced him for being a liberal in “decisions by which the Court has asserted its assumed role of rewriting the Constitution.” It was a new kind of coalition, and in carefully coded language they were attacking Fortas and the Warren Court in general for desegregation and other pro–civil rights decisions as well as for protection for defendants and rulings tolerating pornography. Fifty-two cases were brought up in which it was claimed that in forty-nine of them Fortas’s vote had prevented material from being ruled pornography; this was followed by a private, closed-door session in which the senators reviewed slides of the allegedly offensive material. Strom Thurmond even attacked Fortas for a decision made by the Warren Court before Fortas was on the bench. In October they managed to defeat the nomination with a filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority to break. The pro-Fortas senators lacked fourteen votes, so the appointment was successfully tied up until the end of the congressional session—the first time in American history that a filibuster was used to try to block a Supreme Court appointment. Since Fortas would not be vacating his associate justice seat, Thornberry’s nomination was dead also.

  When Nixon came to power, he began to attack the Supreme Court, attempting to destroy liberal judges and replace them with judges, preferably from the South, who had an anti–civil rights record. The first target was Fortas, who was driven from the bench by a White House–created scandal for accepting fees in a manner that was common practice for Supreme Court justices. Fortas resigned. The next target was William O. Douglas, the seventy-year-old Roosevelt-appointed liberal. Gerald Ford spearheaded the impeachment drive for the White House but it failed. The attempt to place southerners with anti–civil rights records in the court failed. The first, Clement Haynsworth, was rejected by the Democratic majority still angry over the attack on Fortas. The second, G. Harrold Carswell, was found embarrassingly incompetent. But the Fortas attack plus bad health of elderly judges did give Nixon the unusual opportunity of appointing four Supreme Court judges in his first term, including the Justice Department’s legal expert behind the Supreme Court attacks, William Rehnquist.

  To the astute observer, Nixon’s strategy, the new Republican strategy, was first presented at the Republican convention in Miami when he chose Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew. Many thought the choice was a mistake. Given Rockefeller’s popularity, Nixon-Rockefeller would have been a dream ticket. Even if Rockefeller wouldn’t accept the number two spot, New York mayor John Lindsay, a handsome, well-liked liberal who had helped write the Kerner Commission report on racial violence, had made it clear that he was eager to run as Nixon’s vice president. Conservative Nixon with liberal Lindsay would have brought to the Republican Party the full spectrum of American politics. Instead Nixon turned to the Right, picking a little-known and not much loved archconservative, with views, especially on race and law and order, that were so reactionary that to many he seemed an outright bigot.

  Agnew, sensitive to the unusually hostile response to his nomination, complained, “It’s being made to appear that I’m a little to the right of King Lear.” The press took the obvious follow-up question, Why was King Lear a rightist? Agnew replied with a smile, “Well, he reserved to himself the right to behead people, and that’s a rightist position.” Quickly the smile vanished as he talked about the reception he was getting in the party and press. “If John Lindsay had been the candidate, there would have been the same outburst from the South and accolades from the Northeast.” This was exactly the point. Agnew was part of a geographic strategy, what was known in politics as a “southern strategy.”

  For one hundred years, southern politics had remained frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of states’ rights. To white southerners, the Republican Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had forced them to release their Negro property. After Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negro, so for another century white southerners stayed true to their party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was making in his independent runs for president was that southern Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic Party was offering, even though they were not going to become Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as the candidate for president for a party significantly named the States’ Rights Party.

  In 1968 Thurmond, Abe Fortas’s harshest interrogator, committed the once unspeakable act of becoming a Republican. He was an early supporter of Nixon’s and worked hard for him at the Miami convention after getting Nixon’s promise that he would not pick a running mate who was distasteful to the South. So Lindsay had never really been in the running, though he didn’t know this.

  In 1964, after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, close associates said he was depressed and talked of his having just signed over the entire South to the Republican Party. This was why he and Humphrey had adamantly opposed seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention. The inconsisten
t support from the president, attorney general, and other government agencies that the civil rights movement experienced was the result of an impossible juggling act the Democrats wanted to perform—promoting civil rights and keeping the southern vote.

  Many white liberals and blacks, including Martin Luther King, had always been distrustful of the Kennedys and Johnson because they knew these were Democrats who wanted to keep the white southern vote. John Kennedy, in his narrow victory over Nixon, got white southern support. Johnson, as a Texan with a drawling accent, was particularly suspect, but John Kennedy’s southern strategy was choosing him for running mate. Comedian Lenny Bruce, in his not always subtle satire, had a routine:

  Lyndon Johnson—they didn’t even let him talk for the first six months. It took him six months to learn how to say Nee-Grow.

  “Nig-ger-a-o . . .”

  “O.K., ah, let’s hear it one more time, Lyndon now.”

  “Nig-ger-a-o . . .”

  After the Civil Rights Act, white bigots, if not blacks and white liberals, had no doubt about where Johnson stood. In the 1964 election Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide. Republicans bitterly blamed northern liberal Republicans, especially Nelson Rockefeller, for not getting behind the ticket. But in the South, for the first time, the Republican candidate got the majority of white votes. In a few states, enough black voters, including newly registered voters, turned out, combined with traditional die-hard southern democrats and liberals who hoped to change the South, to deny Goldwater a regionwide victory. But the only states that Goldwater carried, aside from his home state of Arizona, were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

  Now Nixon was realigning the party. “States’ rights” and “law and order,” two thinly veiled appeals to racism, were mainstays of his campaign. States’ rights, from the time of Calhoun, meant not letting the federal government interfere with the denial of black rights in southern states. “Law and order” had become a big issue because it meant using Daley-type police tactics against not only antiwar demonstrators, but black rioters as well. With each black riot, more white “law and order” voters came along, people who, like Norman Mailer, were “getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” The popular term for it was “white backlash,” and Nixon was after the backlash vote. Even that most moderate of black groups, the NAACP, recognized this. Philip Savage, NAACP director for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, called Agnew and Nixon “primarily backlash candidates.” He said that having Agnew on the ticket “insures the Republican Party that it will not get a significant black vote in November.”